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Expensive drones take flying lessons from cheaper stunt doubles

Ready to crash and burn

LHJB Photography/Getty

By Conor Gearin

THE school of hard knocks dishes out good lessons. But what if your drone is too expensive to risk? Simple: get cheap, expendable drones to pass on their hard-won skills to their betters. Robots that can learn and share general concepts in this way should also make better decisions.

Teaching an artificial intelligence to fly an expensive vehicle is dicey since it needs to know what both success and failure look like. “Let’s say you want to train it to fly a really big helicopter,” says Shreyansh Daftry at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California. “You need it to crash a lot to get it to learn what a crash is – but that’s often not possible.”

Daftry and his colleagues took a cheaper vehicle and piloted it through a forest, sometimes deliberately crashing it. By learning from the researchers’ mistakes, the robot figured out how to fly safely by itself.

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The researchers then transferred the drone’s abilities to an expensive craft, which immediately put the second-hand know-how to good use by steering clear of the trees itself. They want the stunt double to learn general concepts, not specific rules.

The strategy should work for many kinds of robots, says Nicholas Roy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “It’s a change in how we think robots should make decisions.”

This article appeared in print under the headline “Stunt-double drones pass on hard-won skills”